Sara Wheeler The Magnetic North

Northern soul.

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Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle
(FSG, 315 pages, $26) quite literally describes a circle: Wheeler—a
London-based journalist—travels counterclockwise, in pie-shaped wedges
of map around the northern pole, all the way from the hardscrabble,
reindeer-dominated Chukchi lands of Asian Russia, through Alaska and
Canada and Greenland and Norway back to the muttering isolation of
Russian monks on the Solovki archipelago. It is also, in many ways, a
quite extraordinary book.

While the nearest point of comparison would be Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez’s epic 1986 meditation on the meaning and draw of the great white north, The Magnetic North finds its true forebear in the writings of legendary New Yorker contributor John McPhee. Fifteen years ago, in Terra Incognita,
her book on Antarctica, she had declared herself prejudiced against the
“complicated, life-infested North.” But Wheeler now shares with McPhee
an abiding journalistic interest in—and bemusement with—the fragmented
and all too human, alongside a deep lyrical sense of history, the
esoteric, and the often absurd sublimity and implacability of landscape.

She
also shares McPhee’s meandering, often palimpsestic paragraphs and
penchant for unlikely description. At one point she describes the sky in
the morning as “striated, like bacon”; a researcher is said to “return
every summer, like a tern.”

Wheeler does,
however, have a tendency to insert her own opinions and ideals into the
story, often following up deadpan ironies with too-easy morals, or
writing with an engaged, personal tone that occasionally leads the
reader too much by the hand. In particular, she documents the various
incursions of white resource-seekers into various points on the Circle
with undisguised disdain that, however understandable, amounts to a
failure of tone in a book so devoted to clear-eyed description and
narrative.

Fundamentally, however, The Magnetic North
is a book of stories in the revisionist Kipling mode—modern, corrupted
adventures in some of the last places still ceded, in their alien
inaccessibility, to dreams: the story, for example, of Tété-Michel
Kpomassie, an African who escaped to his vision of Greenland in 1981
surprised to find “a baby smothered by drunken parents, a meal of rabid
dog,” and a conversation conducted between squats over the ice. Or, say,
a research scientist who fought off a polar bear with a frying pan, a
displaced Inuit hunter who worries that “the more I think as an
individual, the less I feel I exist,” a Lappish reindeer herder who
believes that “God had created all the animals except the wolf, who was
begotten by the devil.”

Up
north, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, “everything dissolves
into myths.” Wheeler’s book—in its many moments documenting the wreckage
of the old—leads one as well to the hope that this eternal frontier
doesn’t also dissolve into diamond mines, north-traveling mercury and
PCBs, climbing climes and holes in the air itself—or melt, quite simply,
into the sea.